Printed Texts and the Rural Reader in Late Colonial North India

This article examines peasants’ reading culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial North India. Utilizing records of the inspectors of schools, published vernacular writings, soldiers’ letters, and missionary archives, it provides an understanding of the genres of texts that peasants read or desired to read. In doing so, it explores the nature of printed writings that reached villages and the mechanisms through which these texts were made available and the role of religious and social organizations in producing and distributing a vast literature for peasants, artisans, and others in rural spaces. It also provides an understanding of how printed texts were read by literate and illiterate peasants and other villagers. The article centres on the role of readers and schoolteachers in enabling a culture of rural reading. South Asian scholarship on the reading practices of the lower classes is very limited and broadly relies on book-publishing data and literary genre histories to make broader points about the emergence of a mass reading public. This article moves this scholarship by centring the experiences of peasants and their reading culture, highlighting the texts they read and their methods of reading. It argues that not only did a large body of peasants access printed texts through reading aloud practices, but they also read a variety of texts that took them beyond their immediate labouring roles and identities.